Teaching - Jennifer Van Horn

Graduate students in Sensing Art & Design seminar undertake hearth cooking with guest public heritage practitioner Jerome Bias. Photograph by Izunna Ugwu.

At the University of Delaware (UD), Jennifer teaches courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels on the art and material culture of the United States, museum studies, and theories and methods of material culture study. Recent graduate seminars include: the Material and Visual Culture of Slavery, Landscapes of Enslavement, Faces and Places in the Eighteenth Century, Scale in Vast Early America, and Sensing Art & Design.

A core aim of her courses is to offer participants hands-on experiences with historic artifacts, field-based learning opportunities, guest lectures from scholars and museum professionals, and public-facing assignments that contribute to area cultural institutions.

Then UD graduate students Anne Cross and Emelie Gevalt examine and discuss objects in the Winterthur Museum collection. Photograph by Jim Schenck.

Students in her past classes have created object videos for Truths of the Trade: Slavery and the Winterthur Collection, a student-driven exhibition, and digital exhibit, which empowered students to contribute their own voices and insights to Winterthur Museum’s interpretation of enslavement. Students have written reviews for an online guide to local cultural resources, known as DE MuseReviews. Their reviews encourage UD undergraduates to explore the museums and historic sites around them. Jennifer’s course on public memorials, monuments, and enslavement supported the UD Anti-Racism Initiative (UDARI). The statements that students drafted about ongoing research into campus histories relating to enslavement and dispossession, and the importance of telling those stories, are intended to be used as web text for a landing page about efforts to recover UD’s full history. Jennifer worked with UDARI interns to realize The Black Histories at University of Delaware StoryMap. This StoryMap ties some of the rich histories of Black life—stories of Black community members, Black students, Black faculty, and racial justice activists—to specific sites on the University of Delaware campus and the greater Newark area.

Jennifer is always interested in hearing from prospective M.A. and Ph.D. students. She has advised graduate students in UD’s Art History Program, the American Civilization Program, and the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture.

Her UD Ph.D. advisees’ dissertation topics are as varied as: pastel and pastel artists in 18th-century North America; the intersection of craft and tourism in 20th-century Appalachia; depictions of people of African descent in 18th and 19th-century New England; optical technologies and the control and resistance of enslaved people on 18th-century southern plantations. Past M.A. students, including those in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, have written about: enslaved craftspeople in colonial Annapolis, Maryland; botanical circulation and enslavement in relation to the Peale family; cabinetmaking and the labor of enslaved people in Natchez, Mississippi.